Into the critical pond presided over by Messrs. Spingarn, Brooks, and Mencken leapt Sherman. His academic values were in deliquescence, and he was greeted with cheers when he began to revise his former estimates and with eulogies when he died untimely. Much may be said for the three critics I have taken as big frogs in this puddle: do not forget the gusto of Mr. Spingarn’s temperament, the historical consciousness and fine humanity of Mr. Brooks, the valuable scavenger-work of Mr. Mencken. But after all is said there is no seed, no fertility in the viewpoint of each. We must stress their failures: the failure of Mr. Spingarn to offer for application and development æsthetic ideas, the failure of Mr. Brooks to give the new American writers an image of themselves that would effectively inspire them against the crushing forces of their environment, the failure of Mr. Mencken to escape sophisticated superstitions as he escaped gross superstitions. Look at their disciples and behold clearly the limitations of the pond’s masters. Mr. Mencken has bred a score of little Menckens, men who imitate his style, who spend their time demonstrating, as Mr. Kenneth Burke said of Mr. Mencken, the stupidity of many a stupidity and invariably showing that it is stupid: they have no more capacity for realising great central ideas than Mr. Mencken. Mr. Brooks has inspired Mr. Lewis Mumford, who is a pleasing writer on architecture, a literary critic who seizes on the romantic elements of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and repeats with spirit what his predecessor has said, a thinker whose general terms are vague, and who is impractical because of his credulity as to what modern letters can actually effect in modern society. His distinguishing trait, like Mr. Brooks’s, is a certain fine, sensitive, generous humanity, but beware here! Without a corresponding growth of intellectual power, a corresponding stress on deeds, this fervour may degenerate into mere emotional bluff. And the followers of Mr. Spingarn? Are there any now? There is an æsthetic school of young critics, but they derive rather from Mr. Ezra Pound and the T. S. Eliot who wrote _The Sacred Wood_. For after all Mr. Spingarn only winded a horn and left the startled and delighted self-expressionists to hunt for themselves.